In search of the big idea
New media technology wasn’t enough to sustain the Internet revolution. The full potential of the Internet won’t be realised until someone links it with a new way of looking at the world, as Simon van Wyk writes.
I came across a scary quote the other day. The New York Times’ technology writer, Bob Tedeschi, was writing about a recent survey conducted as part of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, a project funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts which, not surprisingly, conducts research into how the Internet affects American life. Despite the North American navel-gazing dangers of something with such a title, it reveals some universal trends about the Internet.
Anyway, this particular survey revealed that two-thirds of Internet users are now shopping online, a figure which includes more than 85 million people in the US alone. That’s an impressive figure, but that isn’t what scared me. It was in his analysis of the results of the survey, when Tedeschi dropped the comment, “Online shopping is coming to resemble store shopping.”
I read that line and nodded to myself. Then I read it again, trying to work out why such an obvious, innocuous statement sounded so odd to me. Eventually the penny dropped and I realised that simple sentence encapsulated the reason why the Internet has yet to reach the potential it seemed to exude before the tech stock crash of 2000.
It’s because most Internet practitioners are just using the Internet to help people do what they’re already doing, albeit cheaper, faster and easier. They’re not identifying drastically different ways to do things, or different things to do. And the scary part is that most people appear to be happy with that.
Am I alone in thinking this is a bad thing? I don’t think so. Bill Gates, who has used the Internet to leverage his personal fortune toward the $100 billion mark, said recently, “The Internet was supposed to knock off established businesses,” but the real impact of the Internet revolution “is so much less than a lot of people think.”
Shosanna Zuboff, a Harvard Business School professor and author, wrote recently in Fast Company: “The Internet is a force of nature, a hurricane of information at our fingertips… but those who rely on the Net to escape the worst trials of daily consumption know only too well that the revolution didn’t happen. Internet users now appear to spend nearly 10 hours a week online - most of it taking care of stuff for themselves and their families. For today’s time-starved women and men, this is hardly a solution.”
Zuboff says what has been missing from the Internet up to now is “an idea of Copernican stature, powerful enough to reorder the known universe of producing and consuming.”
She calls this big idea a “new enterprise logic,” citing Industrial Revolution pioneers such as Josiah Wedgewood and Henry Ford who applied this new logic to changes in technology and developed innovation such as consumer marketing and mass production. It was not the technology itself, but these radical new ways of using them, that created these revolutions.
Zuboff says, “Revolution can’t be automated. It is brewed in a perfect storm of new markets, new technologies, and a new enterprise logic. That third force - the Copernican idea - was missing from the Internet revolution. We had people hungry for a new consumption experience, and a technology capable of delivering it. But instead of a new enterprise logic, the old adversarial business model prevailed.
“Internet companies scrambled for survival at their customers’ expense, selling private information, chasing us with ads, conning us with low prices and high fees, and secretly monitoring our behavior. They settled for a new distribution channel when they could have made a real revolution.”
David Manasian, writing in The Economist, recalls the mid-1990s, a time of “exhilaration and wonder of millions of people as they logged on to the World Wide Web for the first time. It really did seem possible that the Internet had launched a spontaneous revolution that might lead to a brave new borderless world.”
But less than a decade later, he writes, “The Internet, it seems, has turned out to be simply another appliance, a useful new medium like radio or television, not something likely to usher in a ‘civilisation of the mind’.”
This is despite accelerating advances in the technology underlying the Internet that, according to Manasian, have the potential to change society profoundly
So where is that Copernican idea? Who will be the Henry Ford of the Internet revolution? Bill Gates certainly wants to be. Among other things, Microsoft researchers are now working on ways for consumers to store and catalogue every photograph, e-mail, document or telephone conversation they have had during their entire lifetime (though, as David Manasian points out, “it is not clear why anyone not writing an autobiography would want to do this”).
But I doubt that Bill Gates will be the one to come up with the revolutionary idea. He’s too caught up in the technology to look laterally at the ways in which it can be used.
I think it will be someone who comes more from the business or social side of things, someone who can look past issues like processing power or bandwidth and view the world more through the user/customer’s eyes.
In the meantime, we can enjoy the ways in which the Internet has made incremental improvements in our life. Just as long as we don’t get too complacent.